It has been known in the prior art that target advertisements can be used in conjunction with a network for an interactive service as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,347,632 to Prodigy Services Company. However, this patent does not disclose how advertisement queues that are intelligently prioritized and interactively updated are built. Thus, although the patent discloses that on-line networks can be used to deliver targeted advertisements, it does not disclose the mechanism for building targeted queues accounting for the exposures of users to those ads, and the real-time management of priorities, frequencies, and types of content to be shown.
Other targeted advertising systems have been known such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,099,422. According to this system, a customized video cassette is prepared based on a persons' demographic and zip code information. A relational operation program is used to cause certain items of information to be retrieved from a customized memory for determining which segments are to be used and in which order they are to be recorded onto the videocassette. Unlike the present invention, there is no disclosure of a complete targeting system for on-line media that is both interactive and intelligent.